Beyond Iraq - The Future of U.S. War Crimes

excerpted from the book

In the Name of Democracy

American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond

edited by Jeremy Brecher, Jill Cutler, and Brendan Smith

Metropolitan Books, 2005, paper

p103
Who bears the ultimate responsibility for an illegal invasion and occupation, dropping cluster bombs onto residential neighborhoods, attacking hospitals, and torturing prisoners?

The U.S. Supreme Court affirmatively answered this question in 1945 by upholding the conviction and death sentence of the Japanese commander Yamashita for his failure to halt the crimes of his troops. According to the court's majority opinion, the law of war "presupposes that its violation is to be avoided through the control of the operation of war by its commanders." Fifty years later, this theory of command responsibility was the basis for The Hague Tribunal indictments of the Serbian civilian leader, Radovan Karadzic, and the commander of the army, Ratko Mladic. These courts understood that meaningful enforcement of international law depends on holding those in power accountable for both the effects of their policy decisions and the conduct of their troops.

p103
In the Yamashita case, the U.S. Supreme Court took the doe( trine of command responsibility even farther to include the principle that "a person in a position of superior authority... should also be held responsible for failure to deter the unlawful behavior of subordinates."

p112
Rudolf Hess, the SS commandant at Auschwitz

"This so-called ill treatment and torture in detention centers, stories of which were spread everywhere among the people, and later by the prisoners who were freed... were not, as some assumed, inflicted methodically, but were excesses committed by individual prison guards, their deputies, and men who laid violent hands on the detainees."

p119
Center for Constitutional Rights

Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, article 28:

(a) A military commander or person effectively acting as a military commander shall be criminally responsible for crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court committed by forces under his or her effective command and control, or effective authority and control as the case may be, as a result of his or her failure to exercise control properly over such forces, where:

(i) That military commander or person either knew or, owing to the circumstances at the time, should have known that the forces were committing or about to commit such crimes; and

(ii) That military commander or person failed to take all necessary and reasonable measures within his or her power to prevent or repress their commission or to submit the matter to the competent authorities for investigation and prosecution.

In the Additional Protocol of the Geneva Convention of August 12, 1949 on the protection of victims of international armed conflicts (Protocol I), the criminal or disciplinary responsibility of a superior is provided for, in Art. 86, Para. 2, when such persons "knew, or had information which should have enabled him to conclude in the circumstances at the time, that he was committing or was going to commit such a breach and if they did not take all feasible measures within their power to prevent or repress the breach."

It is therefore according to international customary law completely unambiguous that superiors make themselves culpable under the above-mentioned conditions, when their subordinates commit war crimes.

p131
Memorandum from Alberto R. Gonzales to the President

MEMORANDUM FOR THE PRESIDENT FROM: ALBERTO R. GONZALES SUBJECT: DECISION RE APPLICATION OF THE GENEVA CONVENTION...

Ramifications of Determination that [Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War] does not apply.

*Positive:

* Preserves flexibility... this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.

*Substantially reduced the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act (18 U.S.C. 2441).

* That Statute, enacted in 1996, prohibits the commission of a "war crime" by or against a U.S. official. "War crime" for these purposes is defined to include any grave breach of [Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War] ...

* . . it is difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges based on Section 2441. Your determination [to not apply the Geneva Conventions] would create a reasonable basis in law that Section 2441 does not apply, which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution.

p141
The basic intentions of the Bush administration were set out 2002 in The National Security Strategy of the United States. This extraordinary document declared a war against terrorists "of uncertain duration." It enunciated a doctrine of preventive war in which "the United States will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed." The United States "will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self defense by acting preemptively."

That such policies were not empty words was demonstrated by U.S. attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq and the train of massacres and torture that has followed them. And evidence indicates that further war crimes are currently being planned.

Officials in the Bush administration have made threats against countries all over the world, ranging from "Axis of Evil" members North Korea and Iran to Cuba to Syria, among others. Are these all empty threats? Evidence suggests otherwise. Seymour Hersh, the journalist who did so much to open the realities of Abu Ghraib to public scrutiny, revealed that President Bush had signed "a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia." Hersh's "The Coming Wars" describes these plans. According to Bob Herbert of the New York Times, the Pentagon is even proposing "commencing combat operations" whose purpose is "chiefly to obtain intelligence" -a war crime on its face.

Meanwhile, according to numerous press reports, the Pentagon is considering the use of teams of assassins-what are generally known as death squads-to attack those they allege to be the leadership of the Iraqi resistance. In "The Salvador Option," three Newsweek reporters describe the plans to revive strategies used to terrorize the population of El Salvador during the civil war and Pentagon proposals to use them against the Sunni population in Iraq.

And the Bush administration is preparing to hide its crimes indefinitely into the future. It plans to subject those who have not been eliminated by the "Salvador option" to lifetime "detentions" in secret prisons around the world.

p142
Former Reagan administration official and conservative columnist Paul Craig Roberts argues that, with the elimination of more moderate voices in the Bush administration, the military, and the CIA, "there is no one left to stop them."

p143
The National Security Strategy of the United States of America - September 2002

PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

[In September 2002, well before the attack on Iraq, a major policy report from President Bush to Congress called The National Security Strategy of the United States laid out the basis for the Administration's ongoing disregard of both American and international law. As Senator Robert Byrd observed, "Under this strategy, the President lays claim to an expansive power to use our military to strike other nations first, even if we have not been threatened or provoked. There is no question that the President has the inherent authority to repel attacks against our country, but this National Security Strategy is unconstitutional on its face. It takes the checks and balances established in the Constitution that limit the President's ability to use our military at his pleasure, and throws them out the window. This doctrine of preemptive strikes places the sole decision of war and peace in the hands of the President and undermines the Constitutional power of Congress to declare war."

The report's threat of "anticipatory action" even in the event of "uncertainty... as to the time and place of the enemy's attack" directly contradicts the UN Charter and international law's established prohibition of "preventive war:' The National Security Strategy of the United States provided a charter for the Bush administration's war crimes in the past-and it provides a charter for continuing war crimes in the future.]

The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise.

Today, the United States enjoys a position of unparalleled military strength and great economic and political influence. In keeping with our heritage and principles, we do not use our strength to press for unilateral advantage. We seek instead to create a balance of power that favors human freedom: conditions in which all nations and all societies can choose for themselves the rewards and challenges of political and economic liberty.

Defending our Nation against its enemies is the first and fundamental commitment of the Federal Government. Today, that task has changed dramatically. Enemies in the past needed great armies and great industrial capabilities to endanger America. Now, shadowy networks of individuals can bring great chaos and suffering to our shores for less than it costs to purchase a single tank. Terrorists are organized to penetrate open societies and to turn the power of modern technologies against us.

To defeat this threat we must make use of every tool in our arsenal-military power, better homeland defenses, law enforcement, intelligence, and vigorous efforts to cut off terrorist financing. The war against terrorists of global reach is a global enterprise of uncertain duration. America will help nations that need our assistance in combating terror. And America will hold to account nations that are compromised by terror, including those who harbor terrorists because the allies of terror are the enemies of civilization. The United States and countries cooperating with us must not allow the terrorists to develop new home bases. Together, we will seek to deny them sanctuary at every turn.

The gravest danger our Nation faces lies at the crossroads of radicalism and technology. Our enemies have openly declared that they are seeking weapons of mass destruction, and evidence indicates that they are doing so with determination. The United States will not allow these efforts to succeed. We will build defenses against ballistic missiles and other means of delivery. We will cooperate with other nations to deny, contain, and curtail our enemies' efforts to acquire dangerous technologies. And, as a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed.

As we defend the peace, we will also take advantage of an historic opportunity to preserve the peace. Today, the international community has the best chance since the rise of the nation-state in the seventeenth century to build a world where great powers compete in peace instead of continually prepare for war. Today, the world's great powers find ourselves on the same side-united by common dangers of terrorist violence and chaos.

In building a balance of power that favors freedom, the United States is guided by the conviction that all nations have important responsibilities. Nations that enjoy freedom must actively fight terror. Nations that depend on international stability must help prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Nations that seek international aid must govern themselves wisely, so that aid is well spent. For freedom to thrive, accountability must be expected and required.

The United States of America is fighting a war against terrorists of global reach. The enemy is not a single political regime or person or religion or ideology. The enemy is terrorism-premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against innocents.

In many regions, legitimate grievances prevent the emergence of a lasting peace. Such grievances deserve to be, and must be, addressed within a political process. But no cause justifies terror. The United States will make no concessions to terrorist demands and strike no deals with them. We make no distinction between terrorists and those who knowingly harbor or provide aid to them.

The struggle against global terrorism is different from any other war in our history. It will be fought on many fronts against a particularly elusive enemy over an extended period of time. Progress will come through the persistent accumulation of successes -some seen, some unseen.

Today our enemies have seen the results of what civilized nations can, and will, do against regimes that harbor, support, and use terrorism to achieve their political goals. Afghanistan has been liberated; coalition forces continue to hunt down the Taliban and al Qaida. But it is not only this battlefield on which we will engage terrorists.

Thousands of trained terrorists remain at large with cells in North America, South America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and across Asia. Our priority will be first to disrupt and destroy terrorist organizations of global reach and attack their leadership; command, control, and communications; material support; and finances. This will have a disabling effect upon the terrorists' ability to plan and operate.

While the United States will constantly strive to enlist the support of the international community, we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self defense by acting preemptively against such terrorists, to prevent them from doing harm / against our people and our country; and denying further sponsor( ship, support, and sanctuary to terrorists by convincing or compelling states to accept their sovereign responsibilities. We must be prepared to stop rogue states and their terrorist clients before they are able to threaten or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and our allies and friends. Our response must take full advantage of strengthened alliances, the establishment of new partnerships with former adversaries, innovation in the use of military forces, modern technologies, including the development of an effective missile defense system, and increased emphasis on intelligence collection and analysis.

Traditional concepts of deterrence will not work against a terrorist enemy whose avowed tactics are wanton destruction and the targeting of innocents; whose so-called soldiers seek martyrdom in death and whose most potent protection is statelessness. The overlap between states that sponsor terror and those that pursue WMD compels us to action.

For centuries, international law recognized that nations need not suffer an attack before they can lawfully take action to defend themselves against forces that present an imminent danger of attack. Legal scholars and international jurists often conditioned the legitimacy of preemption on the existence of an imminent threat - most often a visible mobilization of armies, navies, and air 'forces preparing to attack. We must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today's adversaries.

Rogue states and terrorists do not seek to attack us using conventional means.

They know such attacks would fail. Instead, they rely on acts of terror and, potentially, the use of weapons of mass destruction - weapons that can be easily concealed, delivered covertly, and used without warning. The targets of these attacks are our military forces and our civilian population, in direct violation of one of the principal norms of the law of warfare. As was demonstrated by the losses on September ii, 2001, mass civilian casualties is the specific objective of terrorists and these losses would be exponentially more severe if terrorists acquired and used weapons of mass destruction.

The United States has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction-and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.

p148
The Coming Wars
by Seymour Hersh

[Source: Originally appeared in the New Yorker, January 24 and 31, 2005, Available at
www.newyorker.com/

[In a pair of New Yorker articles and his book Chain of Command, the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh not only revealed the prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib but exposed top Bush administration officials' responsibility for it. After President Bush's reelection, Hersh began to investigate the Bush administration's plans for military action against Iran and as many as ten additional countries. Virtually unlimited authority has been given to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to operate in and against other countries without the consent of their governments, the U.S. Congress, or the international community. Such activity violates both American and international law on its face.

Hersh wrote the first account of the My Lai massacre in South Vietnam in 1969. He has won more than a dozen major journalism prizes, including the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting and four George Polk Awards. He is also the author of six books, including The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award.]

George W. Bush's reelection was not his only victory last fall. The President and his national-security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities' strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national-security state. Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that control against the mullahs in Iran and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorism-during his second term.

Despite the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, the Bush Administration has not reconsidered its basic long-range policy goal in the Middle East: the establishment of democracy throughout the region. Bush's reelection is regarded within the Administration as evidence of America's support for his decision to go to war. It has reaffirmed the position of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon's civilian leadership who advocated the invasion, including

Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Douglas Feith, the Under-secretary for Policy. According to a former high-level intelligence official, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff shortly after the election and told them, in essence, that the naysayers had been heard and the American people did not accept their message. Rumsfeld added that America was committed to staying in Iraq and that there would be no second-guessing.

"This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone," the former high-level intelligence official told me. "Next, we're going to have the Iranian campaign. We've declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah-we've got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism."

In interviews with past and present intelligence and military officials, I was told that the agenda had been determined before the Presidential election, and much of it would be Rumsfeld's responsibility. The war on terrorism would be expanded, and effectively placed under the Pentagon's control. The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia.

The Administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since last summer. Much of the focus is on the accumulation of intelligence and targeting information on Iranian nuclear, chemical, and missile sites, both declared and suspected. The goal is to identify and isolate three dozen, and perhaps more, such targets that could be destroyed by precision strikes and short-term commando raids. "The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible," the government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon told me.

Some of the missions involve extraordinary cooperation. For example, the former high-level intelligence official told me that an American commando task force has been set up in South Asia and is now working closely with a group of Pakistani scientists and technicians who had dealt with Iranian counterparts. (In 2003, the I.A.E.A. [International Atomic Energy Agency disclosed that Iran had been secretly receiving nuclear technology from Pakistan for more than a decade, and had withheld that information from inspectors.) The American task force, aided by the information from Pakistan, has been penetrating eastern Iran from Afghanistan in a hunt for underground installations. The task-force members, or their locally recruited agents, secreted remote detection devices known as sniffers-capable of sampling the atmosphere for radioactive emissions and other evidence of nuclear-enrichment programs.

There has also been close, and largely unacknowledged, cooperation with Israel. The government consultant with ties to the Pentagon said that the Defense Department civilians, under the leadership of Douglas Feith, have been working with Israeli planners and consultants to develop and refine potential nuclear, chemical weapons, and missile targets inside Iran.

The Pentagon's contingency plans for a broader invasion of Iran are also being updated. Strategists at the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, in Tampa, Florida, have been asked to revise the military's war plan, providing for a maximum ground and air invasion of Iran. Updating the plan makes sense, whether or not the Administration intends to act, because the geopolitics of the region have changed dramatically in the last three years. Previously, an American invasion force would have had to enter Iran by sea, by way of the Persian Gulf or the Gulf of Oman; now troops could move in on the ground, from Afghanistan or Iraq. Commando units and other assets could be introduced through new bases in the Central Asian republics.

It is possible that some of the American officials who talk about the need to eliminate Iran's nuclear infrastructure are doing so as part of a propaganda campaign aimed at pressuring Iran to give up its weapons planning. In my interviews over the past two months, I was given a much harsher view. The hawks in the Administration believe that it will soon become clear that the Europeans' negotiated approach cannot succeed, and that at that time the Administration will act. "We're not dealing with a set of National Security

Council option papers here," the former high-level intelligence official told me. "They've already passed that wicket. It's not if we're going to do anything against Iran. They're doing it."

The immediate goals of the attacks would be to destroy, or at least temporarily derail, Iran's ability to go nuclear. But there are other, equally purposeful, motives at work. The government consultant told me that the hawks in the Pentagon, in private discussions, have been urging a limited attack on Iran because they believe it could lead to a toppling of the religious leadership. "Within the soul of Iran there is a struggle between secular nationalists and reformers, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the fundamentalist Islamic movement," the consultant told me. "The minute the aura of invincibility which the mullahs enjoy is shattered, and with it the ability to hoodwink the West, the Iranian regime will collapse"-like the former Communist regimes in Romania, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz share that belief, he said.

"The idea that an American attack on Iran's nuclear facilities would produce a popular uprising is extremely ill-informed," said Flynt Leverett, a Middle East scholar who worked on the National Security Council in the Bush Administration. "You have to understand that the nuclear ambition in Iran is supported across the political spectrum, and Iranians will perceive attacks on these sites as attacks on their ambitions to be a major regional player and a modern nation that's technologically sophisticated." Leverett, who is now a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, at the Brookings Institution, warned that an American attack, if it takes place, "will produce an Iranian backlash against the United States and a rallying around the regime."

According to a Pentagon consultant, an Execute Order on the Global War on Terrorism (referred to throughout the government as GWOT) was issued at Rumsfeld's direction. The order specifically authorized the military "to find and finish" terrorist targets, the consultant said. It included a target list that cited Al Qaeda network members, Al Qaeda senior leadership, and other high-value targets. The consultant said that the order had been cleared throughout the national-security bureaucracy in Washington.

Two former C.I.A. clandestine officers, Vince Cannistraro and Philip Giraldi, who publish Intelligence Brief, a newsletter for their business clients, reported last month on the existence of a broad counter-terrorism Presidential finding that permitted the Pentagon "to operate unilaterally in a number of countries where there is a perception of a clear and evident terrorist threat... A number of the countries are friendly to the U.S. and are major trading partners. Most have been cooperating in the war on terrorism." The two former officers listed some of the countries-Algeria, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, and Malaysia. (I was subsequently told by the former highlevel intelligence official that Tunisia is also on the list.)

The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what it calls "action teams" in the target countries overseas which can be used to find and eliminate terrorist organizations. "Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?" the former high-level intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led gangs that committed atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. "We founded them and we financed them," he said. "The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren't going to tell Congress about it." A former military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagon's commando capabilities, said, "We're going to be riding with the bad boys."

"It's a finesse to give power to Rumsfeld-giving him the right to act swiftly, decisively, and lethally," the first Pentagon adviser told e. "It's a global free-fire zone."

p160
There Is No One Left to Stop Them
by Paul Craig Roberts
Source: www.antiwar.com/, November 19, 2004

The United States is in dire straits. Its government is in the hands of people who connect to events neither rationally nor morally.

If President Bush's neoconservative administration were rational, the U.S. would never have invaded Iraq. If Bush's government were moral, it would be ashamed of the carnage and horror it has unleashed in Iraq.

The Bush administration has no doubts. It knows that it is right and virtuous. Bush and the neocons dismiss factual criticisms as evidence that the critics are "against us."

People who know that they are right cannot avoid sinking deeper into mistakes. The Bush administration led the U.S. into a war on the basis of claims that are now known to be untrue. Yet, President Bush and Vice President Cheney consistently refuse to admit that any mistake has been made. The chances are high, therefore, that the second Bush administration will be more disastrous than the first.

The first Bush administration has cost America 10,000 casualties (dead and wounded). Eight of 10 U.S. divisions are tied down in Iraq by a few thousand lightly armed insurgents. Polls reveal that most Iraqis regard Americans as invaders and occupiers, not

as liberators. U.S. prestige in the Muslim world has evaporated. The majority of Muslims who were with us, are now against us. Sooner or later, this change of mind will endanger our puppet regimes in Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia.

In a futile effort to assert hegemony in Iraq, the U.S. has largely destroyed Fallujah, once a city of 300,000. Hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians have been killed by the indiscriminate use of high explosives.

To cover up the extensive civilian deaths, U.S. authorities count all Iraqi dead as insurgents, delivering a high body count as claim of success for a bloody-minded operation. The human cost for American families is 51 dead and 450 wounded U.S. troops-casualties on par with the worst days of the Vietnam War.

The film of a U.S. Marine shooting a captured, wounded, and unarmed Iraqi prisoner in the head at close range has been shown all over the world. Coming on top of proven acts of torture at U.S. military prisons, this war crime has destroyed what remained of America's image and moral authority.

On Nov. 17, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights called for investigation of American war crimes in Fallujah. This is a remarkable turn of events, showing how far U.S. prestige and the morale of our armed forces have fallen.

However, for Bush administration partisans, war crimes are no longer something of which to be ashamed. Reflecting the neoconservative mindset that America's monopoly on virtue justifies any and all U.S. actions, Fox "News" talking heads and their Republican Party and retired military guests have arrogantly defended the Marine who murdered the wounded Iraqi prisoner.

Iraqi insurgents are condemned for deaths they inflict on civilians. But when American troops fire indiscriminately upon civilians and U.S. missile and bombing attacks kill Iraqis in their homes, the deaths are dismissed as "collateral damage." This double standard is a further indication that Americans have come to the belief that U.S. ends justify any means.

A number of former top U.S. military leaders and heads of the CIA and National Security Agency have condemned Bush's invasion of Iraq as a "strategic blunder." These are people who gave their lives to the service of our country and can in no way be said to be "against us."

However, the Bush administration and its apologists regard critics as enemies. To accept criticism means to be held accountable, something the Bush administration is determined to avoid. Condoleezza Rice, who failed as National Security Adviser to prevent the Pentagon from using fabricated information to start a Middle East war, is being elevated to secretary of state in Bush's second term.

Indeed, the entire panoply of neoconservatives, who intentionally fabricated the "intelligence" used to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq, are being rewarded by promotion to higher offices. Stephen Hadley is moving up to National Security Adviser. Hadley is the person who advocates "usable" mini-nukes for the U.S. conquest of the Middle East.

The few officials who are not warmongers, such as Secretary of State Cohn Powell and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, are leaving the Bush administration. Right before our eyes, the CIA is being turned into a neoconservative propaganda organ as numerous senior officials resign and are replaced with yes-men.

With its current troop strength, the Bush administration cannot achieve the Middle East goals it shares with the Israeli government. Either the draft will have to be restored or mini-nukes developed and deployed. As insurgents do not mass in military formations, the mini-nukes would be used as a genocidal weapon to wipe out entire cities that show any resistance to neocon dictates.

Many Bush partisans send me e-mails fiercely advocating "virtuous violence." They do not flinch at the use of nuclear weapons against Muslims who refuse to do as we tell them. These partisans do not doubt for a second that Bush has the right to dictate to Muslims and everyone else (especially the French). Many also express their conviction that all of Bush's critics should be rounded up and sent to the Middle East in time for the first nuke.

These attitudes represent a sharp break from American values and foreign policy. The new [Bush] conservatives have more in common with the Brownshirt movement that silenced German opposition to Hitler than with America's Founding Fathers.

Bush's reelection, if won fair and square, was won because 20 million Christian evangelicals voted against abortion and homosexuals. However, Bush's neoconservative masters will use his reelection as a mandate for further violence in the Middle East. They intend to set the U.S. on a course of long and debilitating war.

There is no one left in the Bush administration, the CIA, or the military to stop them.

In the Name of Democracy

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